originally posted at https://comicalmomentum.tumblr.com/po...
i think it’s time to resume the EGS readthrough. feeling less fragile now.
so where we left off: our four main characters have accidentally used their transformation gun to give main character Elliott a normative body for a cis woman.
i don’t know what online life was like when this first ‘aired’ so to speak but i can imagine it kicked off some spicy discourse. in retrospect it’s very very obviously written by a closeted trans person, and the author acknowledges as much in their(?) commentary. [i do not know what pronouns dan shive currently goes by, please lmk if i have it wrong]
anyway the gun apparently has made Elliott bi, and attractive to people who would otherwise not be attracted on the basis of gender because of magic pheromones. i’m… obviously uncomfortable with both of those ideas.
like, to me attraction is not primarily on the basis of particular body shapes, though i realise in this cisnormative patriarchal world that’s not a normative feeling. like being a lesbian for me is bound up inextricably in the rest of my worldview and politics and so on, and i don’t know whether it’s a “choice” in any meaningful sense but i can say right now it is a choice i would stick to if given the chance to choose differently.
and like, if someone’s a woman or nb person i might be attracted to them and interested in having a relationship regardless of what their body is like. i guess i see attraction as something i have some degree of agency over, rather than something that simply happens to me? so like yes, if i discover someone i thought was not a man is in fact a man, i would stop being attracted to them. likewise if i discovered someone i had thought was a man is actually a trans woman or camab nb person i will be potentially much more interested in any kind of relationship with them. and i don’t see a contradiction in that, nor do i see it as making me ‘really’ bi or anything.
this is why i get so uncomfortable with bi rhetoric that’s like “how can you be Monosexual when you don’t know anybody’s gender just by looking at them” because like, i don’t form attractions and so on just by looking at someone
and this is a longwinded way of trying to explain why i feel the ‘sexuality question’ didn’t really need to be addressed in regard to the gender gun, but of course it was probably weighing really heavily on the mind of dan shive when they wrote this.
ok that’s enough for one post so let’s press on.
it’s weird seeing all the characters react to the supposedly supernaturally attractive “Ellen”, when they know she’s Elliot. like so far there’s none of the violence that comes when people decide the ~deceptive tranny~ is ~tricking you~ into being attracted.
i guess it’s also interesting to compare OotS, even though i gave up reviewing that one. there was a lot of ribbing of the kind that comes when men dress up in drag for halloween and stuff (all predicated on the elimination of trans women of course), ironically pretending to hit on him and stuff. i guess it’s because Roy isn’t “really” “claiming” to be a woman or something.
i’m just waiting for the performative revulsion to come though.
oh ok here it comes, with this pair of “rival” characters.
on the one hand: mens’ sexual entitlement. on the other the revulsion over “deceptive” “man”. the result: two characters ready to be hurled into the sun. and I can calculate the delta-v requirements.
suggested improvement: instead of jokes that imply mild censure, the summonable hammers actually cause severe blunt force trauma and put those characters in the hospital or kill them outright. this is part of the plot. everyone agrees the violence was justified and nobody goes to court.
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